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When I assigned The Interpretation of Dreams in a seminar class a few years ago, a student queried me about one of Freud's remarks at the end of the first preface, a moment when he asks his readers to grant him “the right of freedom of thought—in my dream-life, if nowhere else.” I tried to explain, perhaps a little too hastily, that the plea refers to the fact that Freud used his own dreams as the key source material for the book and this had put him in a tight spot. As he acknowledges: “it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or than is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet.” One's dreams do not usually qualify as scientific data. The preface closes with a request that his readers accept this unorthodox situation and that anyone finding a reference to him- or herself in the book “grant me the right of freedom of thought—in my dream-life, if nowhere else” (Freud, 1900, pp. xxiii-xxiv).
My explanation did not seem to satisfy the student. What I assumed was a relatively simple issue of clarification led to an avalanche of increasingly complicated questions: But what does it mean to reveal the intimacies of mental life to the public gaze—whether one's own or that of others? What does dream-life have to do with the freedom of thought? And what does the freedom of thought have to do with the freedom of speech? Indeed, what does it mean to speak of freedom? And exactly who is free to speak of it? Somewhat inadvertently, this avalanche of questions demonstrated Hannah Arendt's point that “whether we know it or not, the question of politics is